Method of making relatively large-scale, accurate measurements of the earth's surfaces.

Its principal modern uses are in the fields of transportation, building, land use, and communications. Surveying is divided into the categories of plane surveying (mapping small areas) and geodetic surveying (mapping large areas of the globe). The Romans are said to have used the plane table, which consists of a drawing board mounted on a tripod or other support and a straightedge along which lines are drawn. It was the first device capable of recording or establishing angles. With the publication of logarithmic tables in 1620, portable angle-measuring instruments, called topographic instruments, or theodolites, came into use; they included pivoted arms for sighting and could be used for measuring both horizontal and vertical angles. Two revolutionary 20th-century innovations were photogrammetry (mapping from aerial photographs) and electronic distance measurement, including the use of the laser. For more information on surveying, visit Britannica.com. McGraw-Hill Science & Technology Encyclopedia: Surveying
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The measurement of dimensional relationships among points, lines, and physical features on or near the Earth's surface. Basically, surveying determines horizontal distances, elevation differences, directions, and angles. These basic determinations are applied further to the computation of areas and volumes and to the establishment of locations with respect to some coordinate system. Surveying is typically used to locate and measure property lines; to lay out buildings, bridges, channels, highways, sewers, and pipelines for construction; to locate stations for launching and tracking satellites; and to obtain topographic information for mapping and charting. Horizontal distances are usually assumed to be parallel to a common plane. Each measurement has both length and direction. Length is expressed in feet or in meters. Direction is expressed as a bearing of the azimuthal angle relationship to a reference meridian, which is the north-south direction. It can be the true meridian, a grid meridian, or some other assumed meridian. The degree-minute-second system of angular expression is standard in the United States. Reference, or control, is a concept that applies to the positions of lines as well as to their directions. In its simplest form, the position control is an identifiable or understood point of origin for the lines of a survey. Conveniently, most coordinate systems have the origin placed west and south of the area to be surveyed so that all coordinates are positive and in the northeast quadrant. Vertical measurement adds the third dimension to an object's position. This dimension is expressed as the distance above some reference surface, usually mean sea level, called a datum. Mean sea level is determined by averaging high and low tides during a lunar month.

Horizontal control
The main framework, or control, of a survey is laid out by traverse, triangulation, or trilateration. Some success has been achieved in locating control points from Doppler measurements of passing satellites, from aerial phototriangulation, from satellites photographed against a star background, and from inertial guidance systems. In traverse, adopted for most ordinary surveying, a line or series of lines is established by directly measuring lengths and angles. In triangulation, used mainly for large areas, angles are again directly measured, but distances are computed trigonometrically. This necessitates triangular patterns of lines connecting intervisible points and starting from a baseline of known length. New baselines are measured at intervals. Trigonometric methods are also used in

trilateration, but lengths, rather than angles, are measured. The development of electronic distance measurement (EDM) instruments brought trilateration into significant use.

Distance measurement
Traverse distances are usually measured with a surveyor's tape or by EDM, but also may sometimes be measured by stadia, subtense, or trig-traverse. Whether on sloping or level ground, it is horizontal distances that must be measured. In taping, horizontal components of hillside distances are measured by raising the downhill end of the tape to the level of the uphill end. On steep ground this technique is used with shorter sections of the tape. The raised end is positioned over the ground point with the aid of a plumb bob. Where slope distances are taped along the ground, the slope angle can be measured with the clinometer. The desired horizontal distance can then be computed. In EDM the time a signal requires to travel from an emitter to a receiver or reflector and back to the sender is converted to a distance readout. The great advantage of electronic distance measuring is its unprecedented precision, speed, and convenience. Further, if mounted directly onto a theodolite, and especially if incorporated into it and electronically coupled to it, the EDM instrument with an internal computer can in seconds measure distance (even slope distance) and direction, then compute the coordinates of the sighted point with all the accuracy required for high-order surveying. In the stadia technique, a graduated stadia rod is held upright on a point and sighted through a transit telescope set up over another point. The distance between the two points is determined from the length of rod intercepted between two horizontal wires in the telescope. In the subtense technique the transit angle subtended by a horizontal bar of fixed length enables computation of the transit-to-bar distance ( Fig. 1). In trig-traverse the subtense bar is replaced by a measured baseline extending at a right angle from the survey line whose distance is desired. The distance calculated in either subtense or trig-traverse is automatically the horizontal distance and needs no correction.

Subtense bar. (Lockwood, Kessler, and Bartlett Inc.)

Angular measurement
The most common instrument for measuring angles is the transit or theodolite. It is essentially a telescope that can be rotated a measurable amount about a vertical axis and a horizontal axis. Carefully graduated metal or glass circles concentric with each axis are used to measure the angles. The transit is centered over a point with the aid of either a plumb bob suspended by a string from the vertical axis or (on some theodolites) an optical plummet, which enables the operator to sight along the instrument's vertical axis to the ground through a right-angle prism.

Elevation differences
Elevations may be measured trigonometrically in conjunction with reduction of slope measurements to horizontal distances, but the resulting elevation differences are of low precision. Most third-order and all second- and first-order measurements are made by differential leveling, wherein a horizontal line of sight of known elevation is sighted on a graduated rod held vertically on the point being checked ( Fig. 2). The transit telescope, leveled, may establish the sight line, but more often a specialized leveling instrument is used. For approximate results a hand level may be used.

Theory of differential leveling. Other methods of measuring elevation include trigonometric leveling which involves calculating height from measurements of horizontal, distance and vertical angle; barometric leveling, a method of determining approximate elevation difference with aid of a barometer; and airborne profiling, in which a radar altimeter on an aircraft is used to obtain ground elevations.

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